A staff allows the writing of musical notes and signs.
Known as a staff (or pentagram , according to what is indicated in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ) is a type of musical notation that is based on a structure composed of five straight lines located in parallel and at the same separation distance.
Staves are intended for writing music , that is, to record in a written medium the notes and other musical signs necessary to interpret a melody. All lines of the staff, as well as its four spaces, are numbered in a bottom-up direction.
The key
At the beginning of the staff, the clef is placed, which is the symbol that allows each musical note to be related to the location or space it occupies on the staff. This clef connects a note to a specific place on the staff, which means that other notes correspond to certain places and adjacent lines.
The treble clef is the most popular outside the field of music, although it is very rare to find a score that does not include a bass clef staff, unless we are talking about a "part" of an orchestrated piece, that is, the line that a particular instrument should execute. In any case, an experienced musician fluently reads the different keys, in their possible positions. It is worth mentioning that it is possible to alter the initial key throughout a composition as many times as desired, either accidentally (temporarily) or definitively (until the next change).
Writing a pentagram
Basically, a bare staff is useless, since it is impossible to associate a line or a space with a note . After assigning a key, everything changes. However, this is not enough, since if no further clarifications are made, it will only be possible to write melodies in C major or A minor (which are relative keys).
To understand it graphically, it is very useful to think of a piano; A staff with a bass clef on the fourth line gives us the possibility of using the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B, unless an accident is indicated throughout the piece. Excuse the redundancy, these are the notes belonging to C major and its relative minor, which excludes many other tonalities .
Knowing how to read a staff is very important for any musician.
key signature
This is where the key signature comes in, which plays a fundamental role when composing a musical work. It consists of one or more flats or sharps (they cannot be mixed) that indicate permanent alterations to the seven notes listed in the previous paragraph. To build a key signature, it is mandatory to follow an order with the flats, and the opposite for the sharps. In the first case, the sequence is B E A D G C F , and to understand its function, we will take as an example the simplest key signature of this group, which has only B flat: with this configuration, the two keys that can to be played are F major and its relative minor, D.
After the key signature, the figures that represent the musical notes appear. Each figure indicates the duration of the sound and, according to its location on a line or space, the musical pitch. If a tone is needed that is not covered by the staff (higher than the space above the fifth line, or lower than the space below the first line), additional lines and spaces can be drawn. .
Furthermore, there are various signs that turn musical writing into a very rich and complex system ; Some of them allow you to indicate intensity, way of attacking the notes (chopped, sustained, linked), dynamics (making the intensity increase or decrease in a certain portion of the melody).